As radioactive water continues to leak out of containment tanks and into the Pacific Ocean, more truth is leaking out concerning the efforts to cover-up the significance of the Fukushima disaster from the very beginning.

Immediately after the disaster was first reported, I recognized the familiar smell of a cover-up. Here is some of what I wrote on March 14, 2011, just three days after the event:

Since the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, we were given spotty, uninformative reports about the extent of the damage to the critical equipment, despite assurances that the “reactor vessels remain intact”.

* * *

A good deal of the frustration experienced by those attempting to ascertain the status of the potential nuclear hazards at Fukushima, was obviously due to the control over information flow exercised by the Japanese government. I began to suspect that President Obama might have dispatched a team of Truth Suppressors from the Gulf of Corexit to assist the Japanese government with spin control.

During the subsequent weeks and months, I found it necessary to express my disgust over the cover-up of the hazard’s severity on more than a few occasions, such as here, here, here and here. Despite the fact that the first three of those four pieces were written in 2011, a good deal of the information contained therein would come as a surprise to most Americans.

Not included in the foregoing list of links was what I had to discuss about contamination of the Pacific Ocean back on May 12, 2011 – just two months after the earthquake and tsunami:

In the United States, the EPA has apparently become so concerned that the plume of radioactivity may have contaminated fish, which are being caught off the Pacific coast and served-up at our fine restaurants – that the agency has decided to cut back on radiation monitoring. That’s right. Thorough radiation testing of water and fish causes too much transparency – and that’s bad for business. Susanne Rust of California Watch discussed the reaction this news elicited from a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Public Employees – uh-oh!):

The EPA and the Food and Drug Administration increased their radiation monitoring efforts after a massive earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan set off the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

But on May 3, the EPA announced [PDF] in a press release that it was falling back to a business-as-usual schedule of radiation monitoring, citing “consistently decreasing radiation levels.”

* * *

“With the Japanese nuclear situation still out of control and expected to continue that way for months and with elevated radioactivity continuing to show up in the U.S., it is inexplicable that EPA would shut down its Fukushima radiation monitoring effort,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the watchdog group, in a statement.

* * *

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the EPA has proposed raising their guideline radiation limits, or Protection Action Guides. These values are used to guide decision makers about when a clean up is needed after a nuclear incident.

According to Ruch, the new clean up standards are “thousands of times more lax than anything the EPA has ever before accepted.”

The latest disclosures concerning the magnitude of the hazards involved – as well as the efforts by TEPCO and the Japanese government to cover-up such information – have sparked widespread outrage. With a plume of radioactive water on its way to the West Coast, an assortment of experts – none of whom have any credentials to support a claim of expertise on the subject of the bio-effects of ionizing radiation – are busy telling people not to worry. They want us to believe that the radioactive water in the plume will be harmless.

Not only are such claims unscientific (no current data, no readings on radiation levels) they are obviously being made to convince the public of something that will, more than likely, be proven as untrue.

Too many of the news reports concerning the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout are suspiciously similar to the BP commercials featuring testimonials about how the company’s wonderful clean-up job has brought life along the Gulf Coast “back to normal”. Unfortunately, the ugly truth about life along the Gulf of Corexit has not been thrust before the American public with the same aggressiveness as BP’s public relations propaganda.

Since the catastrophe occurred back in April of 2010, one steady source of unvarnished reports on the matter has been Washington’s Blog. On April 18 of this year, Washington’s Blog posted this great piece which links to a number of reports documenting the extent of ongoing damage to the Gulf ecosystem.

We are constantly bombarded with propaganda emphasizing how offshore oil rigs create jobs. What we don’t hear are reports concerning the number of people from the fishing industry who lost their jobs (and their health) as a result of the Deepwater Horizon incident. Consider this AFP report from last year:

Local chemist Wilma Subra has been helping test people’s blood for volatile solvents, and said levels of benzene among cleanup workers, divers, fishermen and crabbers are as high as 36 times that of the general population.

“As the event progresses we are seeing more and more people who are desperately ill,” she said.

“Clearly it is showing that this is ongoing exposure,” Subra said, noting that pathways include contact with the skin, eating contaminated seafood or breathing polluted air.

“We have been asking the federal agencies to please provide medical care from physicians who are trained in toxic exposure.”

She said she has received no response.

The most devastating exposé on the Deepwater Horizon disaster came from Greg Palast, who wrote a two-part report for EcoWatch. A British investigative television program – Dispatches – sent Palast into Baku, Azerbaijan, with a cameraman to investigate a whistleblower’s report that in September of 2008, a BP off-shore rig in the Caspian Sea suffered a nearly identical blow-out to the Deepwater Horizon incident. BP concealed the true cause and extent of the Caspian Sea event from the U.S. regulators and Congress. From Part One:

The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival. But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate.

One cause of the blow-outs was the same in both cases: the use of a money-saving technique – plugging holes with “quick-dry” cement.

By hiding the disastrous failure of its penny-pinching cement process in 2008, BP was able to continue to use the dangerous methods in the Gulf of Mexico – causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history. April 20 marks the second anniversary of the Gulf oil disaster.

There were several failures in common to the two incidents identified by the eyewitness. He is an industry insider whose identity and expertise we have confirmed. His name and that of other witnesses we contacted must be withheld for their safety.

The failures revolve around the use of “quick-dry” cement, the uselessness of blow-out preventers, “mayhem” in evacuation procedures and an atmosphere of fear which prevents workers from blowing the whistle on safety problems.

In Part Two of the report, Greg Palast revealed that one of the classified cables leaked by Private Bradley Manning through WikiLeaks.org to The Guardian was a briefing from the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan to the State Department in Washington. The cable summarized information obtained fromBill Schrader, President of BP-Azerbaijan, about the cause and extent of the 2008 blowout. The collusion of the State Department in this cover-up became an important aspect of Palast’s report:

From other sources, we discovered the cement which failed had been mixed with nitrogen as a way to speed up drying, a risky process that was repeated on the Deepwater Horizon.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council, calls the concealment of this information, “criminal. We have laws that make it illegal to hide this.”

The cables also reveal that BP’s oil-company partners knew about the blow-out but they too concealed the information from Congress, regulators and the Securities Exchange Commission. BP’s major U.S. partners in the Caspian Sea drilling operation were Chevron and Exxon.

* * *

Kennedy’s particular concern goes to the connivance of the State Department, then headed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in the cover-up and deception. Chevron, noted Kennedy, named an oil tanker after Rice who had served on the oil company’s board of directors. “BP felt comfortable – and Chevron and Exxon – in informing the Bush State Department, which was run by Condoleezza Rice,” he said, “and they felt comfortable that that wasn’t going to come out.”

The U.S. Securities Exchange Commission requires companies to report “material” events. BP filed a “20-F” report in 2009 stating, “a subsurface gas release occurred below the Central Azeri platform,” suggesting a naturally occurring crack in the seafloor, not a blow-out. This contradicted the statements of three eyewitnesses and the secret statement of BP’s Azerbaijan President in then WikiLeaks cable.

“The three big actors, Chevron, Exxon and BP all concealed this from the American public,” concludes Kennedy. “This is a criminal activity.”

At this point, anyone who believes that Condoleezza Rice could be chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate is headed for a big disappointment.

With the passing of time, the Deepwater Horizon story isn’t getting any better. It just keeps getting worse.

It has been one year since the earthquake and tsunami which caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant catastrophe. From the very beginning (March 14, 2011) I suspected a cover-up:

Since the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, we were given spotty, uninformative reports about the extent of the damage to the critical equipment, despite assurances that the “reactor vessels remain intact”.

Throughout the year following the Fukushima disaster, there has been an unending series of accounts concerning efforts by the plant operator, Tepco, as well as by governmental officials to cover-up the true extent of this tragedy. The hazardous radiation levels to which local residents were subjected, have become the focus of the most recent news reports exposing cover-up tactics. Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar was recently interviewed for Russia Today. Escobar reported that Fukushima officials concealed radiation data vital to safely evacuate people from that area. This was accomplished by the deletion of e-mails detailing the spread of radiation. An unidentified official (or several officials) from Fukushima prefecture should face responsibility for the loss of that data. At one point during the interview, Escobar remarked that the situation “sounds and looks and quacks like a major cover-up”. He expects that ultimately, “a low-level official” will take the fall for this transgression, with no consequences other than a generous severance package.

TheMainichi Daily News report on this suspicious situation revealed that officials from Fukushima prefecture deleted five days of early radiation dispersion data. In typical bureaucratic fashion, Fukushima prefecture officials claimed that “it was the responsibility of the central government to release the data”.

The obfuscation tactics employed by the plant operator, Tepco, have been apparent since the onset of this disaster. Nevertheless, Tepco continues to “play dumb”. In a March 28 report by Karen Sloan of the Associated Press, Tepco characterized the situation with the explanation that “conditions could be worse than officials had pictured”. The report pointed out that there are “fatally–high radiation levels” at the #2 reactor with less water than anticipated available for cooling the reactor. The damage is so severe that Tepco will need to “develop special equipment and technology” to decommission the plant. Worse yet, the other reactors which experienced meltdowns “could be in worse shape”. You can watch the video version of Karen Sloan’s report here. As for those “fatally–high radiation levels”, Anne Sewell of the Digital Journal pointed out that measurements revealed those levels to be “up to 10 times the lethal dose”. Beyond that, Ms. Sewell didn’t hesitate to remind her readers of the continuing problems encountered by those who have reported on this crisis:

Japanese authorities and Tepco representatives have been caught lying about the true situation at Fukushima on numerous occasions, which adds to the overwhelming stress on the residents.

First-hand accounts of the situation in Fukushima prefecture are provided by blogger Lori Mochizuki and her cohorts at the Fukushima Diary website. Their motto appears on the masthead of the site: “We are against the media blackout – Please support us so that we may inform the world.”

Those interested in keeping-up with the slow trickle of truth about this tragedy can follow the Fukushima Update website. Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer of Fairewinds Associates, is another source who provides regular updates on Fukushima.

As we have witnessed in the aftermath of the financial crisis, those entities responsible for the world’s worst disasters always find themselves rewarded with taxpayer-funded bailouts. The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe is yet another example of this principle. On March 29, Kentaro Hamada of Reuters reported that Tepco has asked the Japanese government for a $12.6 billion taxpayer-funded bailout. (This amounts to 1 trillion yen.) This amount would be in addition to the 850 billion yen which Tepco requested from the government in order to provide victim compensation. That’s right – a free $10.7 billion insurance policy! Is that coverage available to other companies? I’m afraid to ask! Nevertheless, some Japanese officials insist that the indemnity should come at a price – as the Reuters article explained:

The government is keen to obtain an initial majority stake in Tepco in return for the fund injection, with an option to boost the stake to two-thirds if the firm drags its feet on corporate reforms. A final decision, however, would have to wait until the company finds a new chairman, a second source with knowledge of the matter said.

* * *

Trade Minister Yukio Edano, who is responsible for approving a public fund injection, has said he wants the government to have a significant say in managing Tepco, but the two sides have differed over how big the government stake should be.

Moral hazard and nuclear radiation hazard make such a wonderful combination!

Ever since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster occurred on that horrible, twentieth day of April 2010, I have been criticizing the cover-up concerning the true extent of this tragedy. Sitting here in my tinfoil hat, I felt frustrated that the mainstream media had been facilitating the obfuscation by British Petroleum and the Obama administration in their joint efforts to conceal an ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Corexit. On July 22 of that year, I wrote a piece entitled, “BP Buys Silence of Expert Witnesses”. On August 26 of 2010, I expressed my cynicism in a piece entitled “Keeping Americans Dumb”:

As time drags on, it is becoming more apparent that both BP and the federal government are deliberately trying to conceal the extent of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

I got some good news this week when I learned that the mainstream media are finally beginning to acknowledge the extent of this cover-up. While reading an essay by Gerri Miller for Forbes, I learned about a new documentary concerning the untold story of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster: The Big Fix.

Once my enthusiasm was sparked, I began reading all I could find about this new documentary, which was co-produced by Peter Fonda. The Guardian (at its Environment Blog) provided this useful analysis of the movie:

The Big Fix, by Josh and Rebecca Tickell, re-opens some of the most persistent questions about last year’s oil spill. How BP was able to exert so much control over the crisis as it unfolded? What were the long-term health consequences of using a toxic chemical, Corexit, to break up the oil and drive it underwater?

Rebecca Tickell herself had a serious reaction to the chemical after being out on the open water – and as it turned out so did the doctor she consulted in an Alabama beach town. She still has health problems.

Josh Tickell, who grew up in Louisiana, said the Obama administration’s decision to allow the use of Corexit, which is banned in Britain, was the biggest surprise in the making of the film.

“The most shocking thing to me was the disregard with which the people of the Gulf region were dealt,” Tickell said.

“Specifically I think that there was sort of a turn-a-blind-eye attitude towards the spraying of dispersants to clean up the spill. I don’t think anyone wanted to look too deeply at the consequences.”

Dean Blanchard, whose shrimp processing company was once the largest in the U.S., has seen his supply dwindle to “less than 1 percent of the shrimp we produced before. We get shrimp with oil in the gills and shrimp with no eyes. The fish are dead and there are no dolphins swimming around my house.” He knows five people who worked on cleanup crews who have died, and he suffers from sinus and throat problems. Former shrimper Margaret Curole‘s healthy 31-year-old son worked two months on the cleanup and became so sick from dispersant exposure that he lost 52 pounds and is now unable to walk without a cane. “Most of the seafood is dead or toxic. I wouldn’t feed it to my cat,” said her husband Kevin Curole, a fifth-generation shrimper who, like Blanchard, had friends who died from Corexit exposure. “I used to be a surfer but I won’t go in the water anymore,” he said. “The last time I did my eyes and lips were burning.”

When you watch how the the Gulf residents captured in The Big Fix have been affected by Corexit and the spill, beware, it is both heart wrenching and frightening. When you see Gulf residents driven to tears by this environmental tragedy, you want to cry with them. Rebecca, herself, was seriously sickened by Corexit during their filming in the Gulf.

When you listen to eco-activist, Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of champion of the seas Jacques-Yves Cousteau, state so emotionally in the film, “We’re being lied to,” you realize the truth about the Gulf oil spill is being covered up.

Josh Tickell, a Louisiana native, had two questions he wanted answered when he set out to make his documentary: What were we not told by the media in the days and weeks immediately following the April 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and what haven’t we been told since the story faded from the news cycle? If The Big Fix had simply tackled those questions, the story uncovered would be maddening: BP’s repeated flaunting of safety codes; their blatant disregard for the lives of individuals and communities devastated by the spill; collusion among the U.S. government (from local to the White House), the media, and BP to hide the damage and avoid holding anyone accountable. The film’s scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP’s origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran. By doing smart, covert reporting that shames our news media, by interviewing uncensored journalists, by speaking with locals whose health has been destroyed, and by interviewing scientists who haven’t been bought by BP (many have, as the film illustrates), Fix stretches into a mandatory-viewing critique of widespread government corruption, with one of the film’s talking heads remarking, “I don’t have any long-term hope for us [as a country] unless we find a way to control campaign financing.” And yes, the Koch brothers are major players in the fuckery.

The theme of regulatory capture played a role in Anthony Kaufman’s critique of The Big Fix for The Wall Street Journal’s “online magazine” – Speakeasy:

Tickell says that U.S. politicians, both in the Democratic and Republican parties, are too closely tied to the oil and gas industries to regulate them effectively. “Even if these people come in with good intentions, and what to do good for their community, in order to achieve that level of leadership, they have to seek money from oil and gas,” he says.

While the film promises to take a crack at BP, Tickell says the company is more held up as a “universal example, in the way that resource extraction companies have a certain set of operating paradigms which have lead us to a situation where we have Gulf oil spills and tar sands.”

I felt that my conspiracy theory concerning this tragedy was validated after reading a review of the movie in AZGreen Magazine:

The Big Fix makes clear that the Deepwater Horizon disaster is far from over. Filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell (makers of groundbreaking films Fuel and Freedom) courageously shine the spotlight on serious aspects of the BP oil spill that were never addressed by mainstream media. Central to the story is the corporate deception that guided both media coverage and political action on the environmental damage (and ongoing human health consequences) caused by long-term exposure to Corexit, the highly toxic dispersant that was spewed into the Gulf of Mexico by millions of gallons. The Big Fix drills deeply beyond media reports to demystify the massive corporate cover-up surrounding the Gulf oil spill, and BP’s egregious disregard for human and environmental health. The film exposes collusion of oil producers, chemical manufacturers, politicians and their campaign funders that resulted in excessive use of Corexit to mask the significance of the oil, and thereby reduce the penalties paid by BP.

The movie received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, as it did in its initial screenings in the United States. Once audiences have a deeper look at the venal nature of the Obama Administration, it will be interesting to watch for any impact on the President’s approval ratings.

The Internet provides us with innumerable sources of conspiracy theories on a vast array of subjects. A good number of people disregard all of them, as a result of a belief that any conspiracy theory is of dubious veracity. Others look for revealing signs of a fictitious narrative. One such indicator becomes obvious when a conspiracy story twists and turns until it eventually finds its way to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Purveyors of those stories are responsible for the anti-Semitic stigma, which the term “conspiracy theory” frequently evokes.

The latest conspiracy theory to catch my attention arises from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. On July 22, 2010 – three months after that tragic event – I wrote a piece concerning how BP had begun a campaign of signing-up as many potential expert witnesses as could be found, not only to testify on BP’s behalf in administrative and judicial proceedings – but, more importantly – to buy their silence. Litigation attorneys often refer to this tactic as, “buying experts off the street”. As you can see, I have been predisposed to assume that there are likely to be more than a few conspiracies and cover-ups resulting from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. I concluded that essay with this remark about a gentleman named Matthew Simmons:

On July 21, Bloomberg News televised an interview with Matthew Simmons, founder of the Ocean Energy Institute. Among the subjects included in the conversation was the topic of BP’s confidentiality agreements. If what Mr. Simmons said is correct, BP’s legal defense efforts will become futile once the public realizes “we have now killed the Gulf of Mexico”. At least on that one point, the cretins at BP are probably not the only individuals who are hoping that Mr. Simmons is wrong.

Within a few short weeks of that posting, Matthew Simmons was found dead in his hot tub, having suffered an apparent heart attack. I immediately became suspicious . . .

More recently, I came across this posting at a conspiracy-oriented website called The Intel Hub. That item was based on the investigation conducted by a group called the Real Costal Warriors, who have been concerned about the fact that since the Deepwater Horizon event occurred, nine experts, critics and whistleblowers have died under mysterious circumstances. The Intel Hub informed us that the suspicious death toll has now included a tenth individual:

George Thomas Wainwright, a BP ROV pilot was supposedly killed in a freak shark attack in Australia.

The avid outdoorsman and Texas A&M graduate was a marine systems engineer involved with capping the Macondo well after last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Wainwright – whose body was recovered by the college friends he was boating with – is the third man killed by a great white in the state in two months.

The aforementioned Matthew Simmons was included in Real Costal Warriors’ list of nine individuals who are either “dead, missing or jailed”. One of the unfortunate nine – Anthony Nicholas Tremonte – is still alive, although he was jailed after “child porn” was allegedly found on his computer. A similar “child porn” bust was made against another member of this list – Dr. Thomas B. Manton – who was murdered in prison. Here is the list as it appears on the Intel Hub website:

April 2, 2011 – Tucker Mendoza, gulf truth activist, still recovering, along with his niece. Shot four times through his front door, niece hit twice. Anyone with information regarding this shooting incident should call St. John the Baptist Parish Detectives at 985-359-8769 or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111.

February 17, 2011 – LSU scientist Gregory Stone, 54 – Died of Unknown Illness. Stone was an oft-quoted expert concerning the damage the leaked oil might cause to the coast.

January 19, 2011 – Dr. Thomas B. Manton, former President and CEO of the International Oil Spill Control Corporation – imprisonment and subsequent murder while jailed.

December 31, 2010 – John P. Wheeler III, a former Pentagon official and presidential aide and a defense consultant and expert on chemical and biological weapons – was beaten to death in an assault, body was discovered in a Wilmington landfill.

November 23, 2010 – James Patrick Black, an incident commander for BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill response team, died Tuesday night near Destin, Florida in a small plane crash.

November 15, 2010 – Chitra Chaunhan, age 33, worked in the USF Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research – Found dead in an apparent suicide by cyanide at a Temple Terrace hotel. She leaves behind a husband and a young child.

November, 2010 – MIA Status – Dr. Geoffrey Gardner of Lakeland, FL – Swan expert who “ran into legal trouble over an expired prescription license has closed his practice” — Was investigating unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota abruptly and immediately closed his practice, and apparently his investigation into the deaths of swans in Sarasota, suspected to have been impacted by the BP Oil Disaster. No one has heard or spoken with him since. Watch this news report covering his investigation before his disappearance:

October 6, 2010 – Roger Grooters, age 66, was hit by a truck as he passed through Panama City, Florida. Mr. Grooters had been knocked down and killed close to the end of a 3,200-mile trans-America charity ride to raise awareness about the Gulf Coast oil disaster. He began his cross-country bike ride in Oceanside, California, on September 10th. Grooters’s family and friends will cycle the final stretch of the journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic in his honour, raising cash to support Gulf Coast families.

August 9, 2010 – Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, 86, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, was among nine people on board when the 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter, crashed into a brush- and rock-covered mountainside Monday afternoon about 17 miles north of the southwest Alaska fishing town of Dillingham, federal officials said. Stevens was the recipient of a whistleblower’s communication relative to the BP Oil Disaster blow-out preventer, and a conspiracy of secrecy to hide the facts from the public.

“You and your fellow Committee members may wish to require BP to explain what action was ultimately instituted to cease the practice of falsifying BOP tests at BP Prudhoe drilling rigs. It was a cost saving but dangerous practice, again endangering the BP workforce, until I exposed it to Senator Ted Stevens, the EPA, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.” The cause of the crash is still an OPEN investigation by the NTSB (http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/GenPDF.asp?id=ANC10MA068&rpt=p)

August 13, 2010 – Matthew Simmons, age 67 – Simmons’ body was found Sunday night in his hot tub, investigators said. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor – “It was painful as can be” to be only insider willing to speak out against the “officials” during the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

April 6, 2010 – Scientist Joseph Morrissey, age 46 – cell biologist and college professor, a near-native Floridian who chose to return to South Florida after studying at elite universities – was fatally shot during what police say was a home invasion robbery.

Obviously, the possibility exists that none of these incidents resulted from the involvement of these individuals in the Deepwater Horizon controversy. In fact, there is no real connection described, which could remotely connect the death of John P. Wheeler III to Deepwater Horizon. As for the death of George Thomas Wainwright, are we to believe that a Great White shark was trained to attack a particular individual on command? There is an implicit suggestion that a shark attack was not the true cause of death, without any facts asserted which could bring that cause of death into question. The number of victims is apparently being exaggerated here because, as that number increases, it seems less likely that we are looking at random coincidences.

The environmental disaster in the Gulf of Corexit presents enough suspicious circumstances and cover-ups whether or not any of these ten tragedies may have been causally connected to some aspect of the event. Nevertheless, it’s an intriguing conspiracy theory and I’m going to keep it on my radar until it is satisfactorily debunked.

It hasn’t been limited to the Obama administration and it’s really catching on. Transparency just isn’t working out anymore. Things run much more smoothly after a good, old-fashioned cover-up. This attitude is becoming more popular all over the world.

President Obama’s transition from transparency to opacity became obvious last summer, in his discussion about the catastrophe in the Gulf of Corexit. Here’s how I discussed this situation on August 26, 2010:

Earlier this month, Jane Lubchenco, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief, declared that “at least 50 percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the system, and most of the remainder is degrading rapidly or is being removed from the beaches.”

On August 20, we learned about the falsity of the government’s claims that the oil had magically disappeared. The Washington Postput it this way:

Academic scientists are challenging the Obama administration’s assertion that most of BP’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico is either gone or rapidly disappearing — with one group Thursday announcing the discovery of a 22-mile “plume” of oil that shows little sign of vanishing.

After the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear power plant disaster in March, I immediately became suspicious about the lack of transparency concerning that crisis:

A good deal of the frustration experienced by those attempting to ascertain the status of the potential nuclear hazards at Fukushima, was obviously due to the control over information flow exercised by the Japanese government. I began to suspect that President Obama might have dispatched a team of Truth Suppressors from the Gulf of Corexit to assist the Japanese government with spin control.

More recently, Vivian Norris reported on what she has learned about the extent of radioactive contamination resulting from the Fukushima events in the Huffington Post. In the middle of the piece, she took a step back and shared a reaction that many of us were experiencing:

Why is this not on the front page of every single newspaper in the world? Why are official agencies not measuring from many places around the world and reporting on what is going on in terms of contamination every single day since this disaster happened? Radioactivity has been being released now for almost two full months! Even small amounts when released continuously, and in fact especially continuous exposure to small amounts of radioactivity, can cause all kinds of increases in cancers.

In the United States, the EPA has apparently become so concerned that the plume of radioactivity may have contaminated fish, which are being caught off the Pacific coast and served-up at our fine restaurants – that the agency has decided to cut back on radiation monitoring. That’s right. Thorough radiation testing of water and fish causes too much transparency – and that’s bad for business. Susanne Rust of California Watch discussed the reaction this news elicited from a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Public Employees – uh-oh!):

The EPA and the Food and Drug Administration increased their radiation monitoring efforts after a massive earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan set off the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

But on May 3, the EPA announced [PDF] in a press release that it was falling back to a business-as-usual schedule of radiation monitoring, citing “consistently decreasing radiation levels.”

* * *

“With the Japanese nuclear situation still out of control and expected to continue that way for months and with elevated radioactivity continuing to show up in the U.S., it is inexplicable that EPA would shut down its Fukushima radiation monitoring effort,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the watchdog group, in a statement.

* * *

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the EPA has proposed raising their guideline radiation limits, or Protection Action Guides. These values are used to guide decision makers about when a clean up is needed after a nuclear incident.

According to Ruch, the new clean up standards are “thousands of times more lax than anything the EPA has ever before accepted.”

Meanwhile, aversion to transparency is now being discussed in Geneva. John Heilprin is reporting for the Associated Press that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is considering a reversal of its policy of transparency regarding how it spends the billions of dollars contributed to it. Mr. Heilprin’s report discusses the hostile reaction to this suggestion – which resulted from revelations (by the organization’s internal transparency program) that the fund lost millions of dollars as a result of fraud and mismanagement. The proposed solution: to hell with transparency! Be sure to read Heilprin’s entire report. It presents a fine example of the latest trend in coping with the “transparency problem”.

About TheCenterLane.com

TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.